The lights from last year
The lights from last year still overhead,
swaying between bare arms like they’re burned.
My gaze drifts along in yesterday’s rhythm.
I can’t leave, not with this morning
wedged between the canyons.
Murmuring
That thing between the shadows
points at me,
warms the asphalt,
and I don’t even want to look back,
but stand and wait
until a step forward
can feel as natural as breathing.
In this moment of waiting now,
nothing pushes,
nothing hurts,
so I hold my breath—not much,
not like wanting to sink down,
but to hear better
the murmuring within me
and the whisperings of what,
after the first step forward,
a life might hold in store.
Impossible
Maybe waking up,
one day,
with the embarrassment
at the tips of our hair,
that it is, after all,
impossible
to want to hurt
each other like that.
You morning
Your smile and your embrace I dreamt,
also of falling into both—no, crashing,
without fear of not being enough or
seeing that glow dim, the one
you carry, the one we have in us.
Warmth on the skin, inside the bones, I melt
with you, into you, dissolve again and again,
only to be woken day by day
by the world, with its cold eyes of the unloved.
You are here,
you know it, I know it, but neither of us waits,
because between seeking and finding,
there must be breathing.
But I greet you already,
you light, you us, you warmth, you whisper,
you morning.
Forgiveness is like chewing stones
You caught me
liking (this and other things,
but this especially),
beyond your meadow,
your planet,
your perceived freedom
and truth –
where is the apology?
I am only within reach,
but not guilty,
you know that.
But you learned
that I am the enemy.
Forgiveness is like chewing stones
while singing hymns
to feet underneath your table
and blue lips
and silence.
As an unbreakable promise
It can only be
that you should never have had power
with your fear of rejection
and also that fear
of showing it.
Anyway, I had to
shed my fear
that you would turn away from me
– out of self-protection,
out of respect for myself and all those
who died one death or another,
as an unbreakable promise
that I can turn away.
My back must be my knife.
The attempt to say
Every gust of wind is
the attempt to say
You are wild,
but you let the wind only
steer you into paths;
you suppress –
wave after wave –
and you lap against the concrete,
flow humbly back,
only to rejoice again
in the wind,
that wants to tell you
You are the sea.
in the dark I find you best
in the dark I find you best, to search for you in it with coolness on my eyes, my skin senses yours like gold dust and impatience, everything turns smooth and collapses, wing tips side by side, trembling, free, together, maybe in a kiss or the light at the edges of our lashes, I take it all, always.
monologue with tomorrow
when you pull your arms in and
your hands are fists,
your face open only to the path
your breath takes in grey,
then this is no prayer,
because it is cold and empty –
it is nothing more
than a monologue with tomorrow,
even though you must sense
that you ruin yourself
as soon as it goes to sleep.
but it’s all the same to you, and you
leave us lying in this grey,
because it’s your currency,
as if we were rich in it and
didn’t miss the colors.
(
I bring you grey, but it
is
never
enough
for
you.
)
only then I am not afraid
a smoke-white raven patrols the house and
tells me then: you are not too sensitive,
they’re mistaken, they’d never let me
speak with them, that must
be the sign for you. and it flies into my face
without fear, and only then I am not afraid.
or a sun
no place opposite is what you might guess (just as you choose to overlook the landscape behind your heart, with roots and graves reaching between your ribs), no truth can suffice. maybe because they beat everything transparent, until everything was never there. you said about him, that it was better than being beaten. you know, I want to go back and now be a wall, taller than words, deeper than the graves. or a sun, to which they can send their arrows.
still my name moves
still my name moves
enough in yesterday’s whirlpool, so –
braid the unspoken into my hair,
redundant, just in case,
a somewhere beautiful thing for those
above my head and heart,
everything against interruption and contrast,
hang it opaque and say:
shadows don’t break bones.
out of my chest
despite persistent emotional caution
blinking and stumbling hard forward,
asking for hands in the desert, in
the useless nothing, where too inconspicuous
a heart can grow alongside fear –
but the line also splinters slowly,
out of my chest into the possible,
into the nearby mirrors, into my head.
through their film
open the mantra
with your eyes,
through their film,
until the
repetition
gains permanent centrifugal force,
having to sit so firmly in
their minds
that they want to tell you
everything has always
been this way.
all that glistens
the turning over with
seeing everything,
loving everything
slipped between
the dusty folds,
seemingly permanent –
but turning over
into each other to
see more,
love more,
that is the green
in the winterland
and all that glistens
between the gravel
and the grey.
we are signals
one last morning of general sadness
and my head leaned against the sun –
I dreamt of every movement,
doubtful, since everything else was
an in-between life (raising, preserving,
saving), but we are signals of the same chain,
we make the damned sky shine bright.